Fear of Fifty (38 page)

Why did Venice follow this trip? It was because of Carly Simon. Otherwise I might just have gone straight back to Connecticut, where Will was house-sitting for me.

“Let's meet in Venice on August first at the Cipriani,” Carly Simon had proposed some months before at a dishy lunch we were having in the Village. We were boastfully comparing young lovers. We would bring them both to Venice and see what happened. (Did we plan to swap? Only in fantasy.) So I booked the Cipriani (which I never knew existed before Carly mentioned it). And after Moscow, I met Will at the airport in Milan. We ran to a hotel room to plight our troth—if that's what it's called—and then we flew into Venice at dusk. The sight of the city when you are in love is expansive, not entrapping.

I had money then—or thought it belonged to me rather than the IRS—so we took a suite by the pool at the Cipriani. We never left it during the day. All morning and afternoon we stayed in bed, making love and ordering room service; all night we wandered the streets.

Carly never showed up with her then-lover, Al Corley. It had been one of those exuberant invitations about which the inviter has immediate amnesia. But we missed no one. At night, Will taught me to swim in the huge abandoned pool (built oversized because someone had confused meters with feet). We explored the little
calli
of the Giudecca in the darkness. We drank in cafés, in our room, in bed, by the pool. We made love as if we had invented it, thinking we had. In that we were like all lovers.

Venice became our special place. Every summer, we would come to a rented flat or house or
piano nobile
with Molly and Margaret. We would slide into the adagio rhythms of the lagoon. Will would go out to get fresh bread in the morning. We'd lazily breakfast. Then I would write. Then we'd all troop out to lunch in a local trattoria.

From the age of five on, Molly summered in Venice. We'd swim at the Cipriani most of the late afternoon, then shower, take the vaporetto home, then change and go out for dinner—a family of four.

The day revolved around writing, strolling, swimming, meals. The tensions of New York leaked away. I would keep notes, dream up poems, begin stories I thought I had to write. Sometimes they became books and sometimes they did not. But the languid pace of life promoted this flowering. And the watery world baptized it. I would always come home with my head full of exotic blooms.

How I
dreamed
in Venice—that boat floating on the Adriatic Sea! It was like sleeping on a schooner, with water lapping and the rocking of the tides. Sometimes I thought I came to Venice just to sleep.

It was during those summers that I began to research the ghetto of Venice and fall under the spell of the sixteenth century.

Will and I always arrived laden with books to read together. We would read aloud, marking and annotating pages. From the earliest days, we were introduced to Venetians who showed us around, opened the museums and libraries to us. We began to scout the city to see if it had a story it wanted to tell me—or tell
through
me.

The ghetto of Venice caught us. To show his solidarity with me, Will began wearing a Star of David embedded in Venetian glass. We also began reading histories of the Venetian Jews.

Thanks to Cecil Roth, Riccardo Callimani, and the stones themselves, sixteenth-century Venice began to come alive for me. It was an island refuge, infiltrated by all the Jews seeking asylum there. Sephardim from Spain, Ashkenazim from Germany, Levantine Jews from the Near East, met and mingled in Venice with Christians and Muslims, creating the magic of Venetian culture.

I immediately saw an analogy between that island Venice and that island Manhattan. Venice in the sixteenth century was Manhattan in the early twentieth century: teeming with Jews driven out of Europe and the Middle East, destined to enrich the Christian world and to change it forever.

The Jews came to Venice because Venice took them in, and they soon became dealers in old clothes, antiquities, books. They specialized in stagecraft, printing, bookbinding, art, antiquities—as now. They established synagogues, theaters, publishing houses, trading companies. They practiced the arts. Focusing their energies on the few things that were not forbidden them, they became a
force.
And they prospered. And Venice prospered. They brought another sort of yeast to the great sugared cake of the Serenissima.

During the long lazy sojourns in Venice, a story began to be whispered through the stones. A Jewish girl, the
real
Jessica, is imprisoned in the ghetto by her father, Shylock (or Shallach, as the name must have been before it was Anglicized).

On quite an ordinary daily excursion, our Jessica encounters a young Englishman in the ghetto—where he has come to hear the famous rabbis preach and learn new stagecraft (for which the Jews of Venice are famous in the sixteenth century). He is only twenty-eight, a poet, actor, playwright, who has come to Venice with his lascivious bisexual patron, the Earl of Southampton. The plague has closed the London theaters and there is time to travel with his lord (who is madly in love with him and also, in the way of mad lovers, wants to be his master).

Will—for that, ironically, is the young man's name—and Jessica fall in love at first sight, as all fairy tale lovers must, and their love inspires them to flee the ghetto, flee Southampton, Shallach, and all cynicism—since love is born to defeat cynicism.

Something along these lines was cooking in my head as I finished another novel,
Parachutes & Kisses.
That winter an unexpected invitation came for me to be a judge in the Venice Film Festival. Knowing I needed to push this novel toward the light, I immediately accepted—bringing along my own Will as
cavaliere servente.

The film festival was a madhouse. Yevgeny Yevtushenko had come from Moscow, with a British wife he was destined soon to part from, and the manners of a mogul. Tall, theatrical, accustomed to filling stadia with his worshippers, he was spoiling for a fight. Pipe-smoking, brooding Günter Grass arrived from Germany in a similar mood, but he was too clever and thoughtful to show it. Balthus would have rather been painting. He stayed at the Gritti, with his beautiful Japanese wife and daughters, and languidly seemed to take the trip strictly as a boondoggle—which was wise. We saw him rarely, and never at screenings. The brothers Taviani—Paolo and Vittorio—were modest, humorous, and terminally nervous. They were about to showcase Caos, their brilliant Pirandello movie. Michelangelo Antonioni was not physically well, but he was passionately serious and he saw every film.

All day, the jury watched movie after movie—the best, the worst, the mediocre. Socialist-realist movies from the Eastern Bloc, Indian movies from New Delhi's celluloid mills, Chinese movies produced by Hong Kong moguls, Japanese art or exploitation movies, movies to shock and movies to numb, more movies than you ever dreamed were made on the planet in a single year.

It grew boring. Nothing is more boring than mediocre movies. And as the days passed, you could see the storm clouds looming over the lagoon.

When Claudia Cardinale arrived with her Sicilian husband-producer, the stage was set for the showdown, the battle at the O.K. Corral. Cardinale was playing Clara Petacci, Mussolini's last mistress, in an awful film based not so much on history as on soap opera. The Russian at once saw something to protest. And the German saw a Russian he could best. And the commotion began.

How
it started is a mystery. Conferences and seminars do tend to spontaneously combust after five days or so. Perhaps it is the discipline they impose on undisciplined people. Or perhaps it is that artists are unaccustomed to living communally and can only manage it for brief periods. Perhaps all that community requires a safety valve and the explosion must, inevitably, come.

First, the jury was debating the “morality” of watching a film depicting Mussolini as a lover, then there were verbal skirmishes at lunch and tea, and suddenly Yevgeny was holding a press conference and the Italian papers had something to write! The festival might be a bore, but the judges were not.
Pow! Bam! Socko! Smash!

“It is an outrage to glorify Fascists as lovers”—or some such. The hoopla fed on itself, as press creations tend to do. The media love nothing more than caricaturish controversy. The French and English vied in absurdity. The Italians leapt in gleefully. The American papers picked it up from there.

We were all duly interviewed and quoted, of course. We were all obliged to take positions over this harmless melodrama. (Anita Hill has said that once you become a public figure, you are expected to have opinions on everything. “I reserve the right not to comment,” she said. If only I—and the rest of the jury—had been as wise as she!)

Claudia Cardinale was photographed looking lovely in her outrage. Her husband-producer (or producer-husband) vowed dark
vendette.

And so the festival got the media event it wanted and everyone got publicity—whether they wanted it or not. And the city of Venice got its money's worth from the celebrities it paid to fly and feed. And Liv Ullmann winged in at the last to present the Golden Lion—rampant once again on a field of flacks.

The wonder of this festival and its spontaneous combustion got me thinking of my Venice novel again. Every writer longs to write a
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
sort of tale. Every writer wants to travel back in time as long as the future safely waits to be returned to.

What if
my
Jessica were not Jewish but, when we first met her, Christian? What if she were a Radcliffe-educated reluctant debutante who came from a dusty old WASP family on the Upper East Side, and went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London instead of making a proper marriage, and was, despite family disapproval, determined to be an actress. What if she had adored Shakespeare's poetry all her life, and, one day in Venice, after judging a film festival, she slipped through a crack in time, and found herself a sixteenth-century Jewess in the ghetto, falling in love with a poetic English lad called Will?

What if
is always the beginning of a story.

I had my tale. Or it had me.

I began frantically scribbling notes. Here was a chance to bake a cake made of all I knew about Venice, Shakespeare, Elizabethans, and Jews.

I made the tale properly Shakespearean and bloody. Poniards, poisons, daggers, dirks,
stiletti
were obligatory. I wanted to hear Elizabethan word-music in my ears, so I listened repeatedly to Sir John Gielgud reading the sonnets until I could not stop hearing it. I searched out every production of
The Merchant of Venice
playing that year. I watched old films and videotapes of the play. I read it aloud to myself. Then I read everything about it I could find. “Shakespeare is a happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance,” Joyce said (through Stephen Daedalus). I did not want to prove him right, but I did want to travel back in time. So I returned to the ghetto in rainy autumn and brooded. Again, I heard the whispers of the stones. Again, I saw young Shakespeare and a Dark Lady walking in the rain.

The secret of making Shakespeare work in the present is not obscuring its basic truths about character with Elizabethan flourishes and folderol. Shakespeare's audiences saw through these, of course, because they were used to his conventions of language and stagecraft. We must make the plays as transparent as they were to the Elizabethans. A good adaptation must remove the barrier that separates Elizabethan England from us.

But
The Merchant
is a very tough play to make modern because Shakespeare's attitude toward Shylock is so distasteful on grounds of anti-Semitism and yet so intrinsic to the play. Shakespeare sees Shylock as a human being like himself, but the old prejudice of Elizabethans toward Jews (in their very Jew-hating time) clings. Even the character of Jessica is weaker than that of Portia. And Jessica's renunciation of her father is cruel. So is her theft of his precious ring (given to him by her dead mother). Shylock's comparison of daughters and ducats can be read coldly as a slur on Jews, but can also be played hotly, illuminating a father's rage and a father's love. (Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman did it.)

I wanted
Serenissima
to solve the dilemma of Jessica once and for all, show why Jessica betrayed her father—not only for love and freedom, but also for
poetry.
I also wanted to unravel the mystery of the Dark Lady of the sonnets. I thought to kill two birds with one stone, making her that
same
Jewess in the ghetto who inspired the character of Jessica.

It was my usual tall order for myself. The book was to be literary, yet somehow also enlightening to twentieth-century women, yet also a good yarn compelling the reader to turn the page, yet also a brief for poetry's centrality to our lives.

Though
Serenissima
still bewitches me with its
potential,
I suspect I partly missed with this novel because I did not yet entirely understand my own relation to the city of Venice. Also, I tried to do too many things in one slim book.
Serenissima
should have been longer and richer, like
Fanny.
It should have had more characters, more crosscurrents and subplots. It should also have been edited less.

Self-conscious about my own tendency toward excess, I hired a freelance editor to trim my sails. We both encouraged each other to trim too much, cutting rather than expanding the novel. V. S. Pritchett says that the strengths and weaknesses of a writer are so interwoven that you cannot give up one without giving up the other.

Venice, like New York, was an ancestral city to me, a city that drew me back to the roots of my Jewishness. But it was more: Its myth is that of the magic island where problems are resolved, puzzles solve themselves, or at least dissolve themselves in water.